Life Changes / Website Refresh

First of all, welcome to my new website design, aptly named “Refresh”.
I got the design from oswd.org and tweaked it to my
needs. Not everything is done yet (esp. Ruby code highlighting), but
I’m quite happy with the results. In addition, I’m now running the
mental branch of Radiant. I thought about running facets, but it
has fallen too far behind mental and I need to finish the API. FYI,
the different categories are shown on the homepage through the
aggregation
extension
I finished last week.

In the course of redoing my website, I somehow lost all of my articles
and had to re-enter them by copy-paste from Google’s cache. Thanks
Google, you saved my butt!

And then there’s the life changes. I decided to leave
KCKCC because I was given a nice offer by
ThinkPartnership, for whom Ed
Hickey, a colleague and fellow Rubyist, works. In the span of the
week between when I left KCKCC and started at THK, some personal
things came up and I had to turn THK down at the last minute, the
morning I was due to start work. I felt bad about the late notice,
but luckily there were no hard feelings between us.

So instead, I’m working “full-time” for the stealth Internet startup
I’ve been doing part-time since September. So essentially, I’m
working from home on that and now available for short-term/small-scope
contract projects. I’d especially love to help anyone customize
Radiant for their needs.

In the course of all of this, I spent time in San Francisco and was
able to meet some really cool people. First, of course, were the CEO
of the startup, Gaurav, and his business partner, Tim. I also was
lucky enough to attend the East Bay Ruby Meetup and ask questions
about scaling of none other than Coda Hale.
Then, the next morning, I met André Lewis of GoogleMaps
fame.
The biggest ego boost I had was that he was interested in my work on
Radiant. It’s awesome to be part of such a supportive community.

It’s too late for me to finish it before Tuesday, but I have planned a
presentation to our local Ruby Group, titled
Customizing RadiantCMS with Extensions. It’s the
presentation I had proposed for RailsConf but wasn’t accepted.
Speaking of, are you
going?